Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T12:59:16.876Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On the genitive's trail: data and method from a sociolinguistic perspective1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2014

BRIDGET L. JANKOWSKI  and
SALI A. TAGLIAMONTE
BRIDGET L. JANKOWSKI
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto, Sidney Smith Hall 4th floor, 100 St George Street, Toronto Ontario M5S 3G3, [email protected], [email protected]
SALI A. TAGLIAMONTE
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto, Sidney Smith Hall 4th floor, 100 St George Street, Toronto Ontario M5S 3G3, [email protected], [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Research on the English genitive (e.g. Rosenbach 2007: 154) reports increasing use of the s-variant. This has been explained as extension to inanimate possessors, a semantic shift (e.g. Hundt 1998; Rosenbach 2002), or due to the pressures of economy in journalism, a register change (Hinrichs & Szmrecsanyi 2007; Szmrecsanyi & Hinrichs 2008). The present work reports on a large-scale sociolinguistic investigation of the genitive in vernacular Canadian English using socially stratified corpora and individuals of all ages. The results show that human, prototypical possessors are 96 per cent s-genitive and non-humans are 95 per cent of-genitive. Within the small envelope where both forms are possible, we discover that variation patterns quite differently depending on animacy. For humans, use of the s-genitive is stable in apparent time and correlates with whether or not the possessor ends in a sibilant. In contrast, non-human collectives/organizations reveal an increasing use of s-genitives in apparent time and a favouring effect of short possessors, persistence (when an s-genitive has occurred recently in the previous discourse) and when the individual has a blue-collar job. Groups comprising humans (collectives and organizations), such as our church's youth group, and places that are possible locations for humans (countries, cities, etc.), as in Toronto's best restaurant, are the prime conduit for this change. These findings from vernacular speech confirm the extension of the s-genitive in inanimates by semantic extension.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 18 , Issue 2: Genitive variation in English , July 2014 , pp. 305 - 329
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the following grants to Sali A. Tagliamonte (2003–6): Linguistic changes in Canada entering the 21st century and (2007–10) Directions of change in Canadian English. Thanks to Christine Berger and Lydia Jarmasz for the first stage of data extraction. This work has benefited greatly from comments by the volume editors, two anonymous reviewers and many discussions with Anette Rosenbach, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, Lars Hinrichs and Joan Bresnan. Any errors or shortcomings in interpretation remain our responsibility.

References

Altenberg, Bengt. 1982. The genitive v. the of-construction: A study of syntactic variation in 17th century English. Malmö: CWK Gleerup.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas. 2003. Compressed noun-phrase structures in newspaper discourse: The competing demands of popularization vs economy. In Aitchison, Jean & Lewis, Diana M. (eds.), New media language, 169–81. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). 2007. Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk (accessed 4 August 2013).Google Scholar
Börjars, Kersti, Denison, David, Krajewski, Grzegorz & Scott, Alan. 2013. Expression of possession in English. The significance of the right edge. In Börjars, Kersti, Denison, David & Scott, Alan (eds.), Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession, 123–48. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burnard, Lou (ed.). 2007. Reference guide for the British National Corpus (XML Edition). www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/docs/URG/ (accessed 4 August 2013).Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W., Chafe, Wallace L., Meyer, Charles & Thompson, Sandra A.. 2000. Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, part 1. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W., Chafe, Wallace L., Meyer, Charles, Thompson, Sandra A. & Martey, Nii. 2003. Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, part 2. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Francis, W. Nelson & Kucera, Henry. 1979. Manual of information to accompany A Standard Corpus of Present-Day Edited American English, for use with Digital Computers. http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/brown/INDEX.HTM (accessed 4 August 2013).Google Scholar
Grafmiller, Jason. 2010. Variation in English genitives across modality and genre. Qualifying paper, Stanford University. http://linguistics.stanford.edu/documents/Grafmiller-FinalQP.pdf (accessed 31 January 2014).Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory R. 1988. Advanced Varbrul analysis. In Ferrara, Kathleen, Brown, Becky, Walters, Keith & Baugh, John (eds.), Linguistic change and contact, 124–36. Austin: University of Texas Department of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory R. 1993. The quantitative analysis of linguistic variation. In Preston, Dennis (ed.), American dialect research, 223–49. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hansard (n.d.) Hansard Association Style Guide. www.hansard.ca/styleguide.pdf (retrieved 4 August 2013).Google Scholar
Hernández, Nuria. 2006. User's guide to FRED. Freiburg: English Dialects Research Group. www.freidok.uni-freiburg.de/volltexte/2489/pdf/Userguide_neu.pdf. (retrieved 20 September 2013).Google Scholar
Hinrichs, Lars & Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2007. Recent changes in the function and frequency of standard English genitive constructions: A multivariate analysis of tagged corpora. English Language and Linguistics: 11 (3), 437–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne, 1998. New Zealand English grammar. Fact or fiction. A corpus-based study in morphosyntactic variation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne, & Mair, Christian. 1999. ‘Agile’ and ‘uptight’ genres: The corpus-based approach to language change in progress. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 4, 221–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne & Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2012. Animacy in early New Zealand English. English World-Wide 33 (3), 241–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne, Sand, Andrea & Skandera, Paul. 1999. Manual of information to accompany The Freiburg–Brown Corpus of American English (‘Frown’). http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/frown/INDEX.HTM (accessed 4 August 2013).Google Scholar
Jankowski, Bridget L. 2013. A variationist approach to cross-register language variation and change. PhD dissertation, University of Toronto.Google Scholar
Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey N. & Goodluck, Helen. 1978. Manual of information to accompany the Lancaster–Oslo/Bergen Corpus of British English, for use with digital computers. http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/lob/INDEX.HTM (accessed 4 August 2013).Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas. 1993. The genitive versus the of-construction in newspaper language. In Jucker, Andreas (ed.), The noun phrase in English: Its structure and variability, 121–36. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1990. The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change. Language Variation and Change 2, 205–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of linguistic change, vol. 2: Social factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 2002. Driving forces in linguistic change. Paper presented at the 2002 International Conference on Korean Linguistics. Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea, 2 August 2002. www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/Papers/DFLC.htm (accessed 15 September 2013).Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, Hundt, Marianne, Mair, Christian & Smith, Nicholas. 2009. Change in contemporary English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ljung, Magnus. 1997. The s-genitive and the of-construction in different types of English texts. In Fries, Udo, Müller, Viviane & Schneider, Peter (eds.), From Ælfric to the New York Times: Studies in English corpus linguistics, 21–32. Amsterdam: Rodopi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mair, Christian. 1997. Parallel corpora: A real-time approach to the study of language change in progress. In Ljung, Magnus (ed.), Corpus-based studies in English: Papers from the Seventeenth International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 17), 195–209. Amesterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Mair, Christian. 2006a. Inflected genitives are spreading in present-day English, but not necessarily to inanimate nouns. In Mair, Christian & Heuberger, Reinhard (eds.), Corpora and the history of English: Papers dedicated to Manfred Markus on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, 243–56. Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar
Mair, Christian. 2006b. Twentieth-century English: History, variation and standardization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, Gerald, Wallis, Sean & Aarts, Bas. 2002. Exploring natural language: Working with the British component of the International Corpus of English. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Connor, Catherine, Maling, Joan & Skarabela, Barbora. 2013. Nominal categories and the expression of possession: A cross-linguistic study of probabilistic tendencies and categorical constraints. In Börjars, Kersti, Denison, David & Scott, Alan (eds.), Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession, 89–122. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan. 2003. Variationist approaches to syntactic change. In Joseph, Brian D. & Janda, Richard D. (eds.), The handbook of historical linguistics, 509–28. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana & Tagliamonte, Sali. 2001. African American English in the diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Raab-Fischer, Roswitha. 1995. Löst der Genitiv die of-Phrase ab? Eine korpusgestützte Studie zum Sprachwandel im heutigen Englisch. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 43, 123–32.Google Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2003. Cognitive complexity and horror aequi as factors determining the use of interrogative clause linkers in English. In Rohdenburg, Günter & Mondorf, Britta (eds.), Determinants of grammatical variation in English, 205–49. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2002. Genitive variation in English: Conceptual factors in synchronic and diachronic studies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2003. Aspect of iconicity and economy in the choice between the s-genitive and the of-genitive in English. In Rohdenburg, Günter & Mondorf, Britta (eds.), Determinants of grammatical variation in English, 379–411. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2005. Animacy versus weight as determinants of grammatical variation in English. Language 81 (3), 613–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2006. Descriptive genitives in English: A case study on constructional gradience. English Language and Linguistics 10 (1), 77–118.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2007. Emerging variation: Determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English. English Language and Linguistics 11 (1), 143–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2008. Animacy and grammatical variation: Findings from English genitive variation. Lingua 118, 151–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette & Vezzosi, Letizia. 2000. Genitive constructions in Early Modern English: New evidence from a corpus analysis. In Sornicola, Rosanna, Poppe, Erich & Shisha-Halevy, Ariel (eds.), Stability, variation and change of word-order patterns over time, 285–307. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rudanko, Juhani. 2003. More on horror aequi: Evidence from large corpora. In Archer, Dawn, Rayson, Paul, Wilson, Andrew & McEnery, Tony (eds.), Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 conference. UCREL technical paper number 16, 662–68. UCREL, Lancaster University. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/publications/CL2003/papers/rudanko.pdf (retrieved 4 August 2013).Google Scholar
Sankoff, David, Tagliamonte, Sali & Smith, Eric. 2005. Goldvarb X: A variable rule application for Macintosh and Windows. Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto. http://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/goldvarb.htm (accessed 4 August 2013).Google Scholar
Scherre, Marta & Naro, Anthony. 1991. Marking in discourse: ‘Birds of a feather’. Language Variation and Change 3 (1), 23–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scherre, Maria Marta Pereira & Naro, Anthony. 1992. The serial effect on internal and external variables. Language Variation and Change 4 (1), 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2006. Morphosyntactic persistence in spoken English: A corpus study at the intersection of variationist sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and discourse analysis. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2013. The great regression: Genitive variability in Late Modern English news texts. In Börjars, Kersti, Denison, David & Scott, Alan (eds.), Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession, 59–88. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt & Hinrichs, Lars. 2008. Probabilistic determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: A multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres. In Nevalainen, Terttu, Taavitsainen, Irma, Pahta, Päivi & Korhonen, Minna (eds.), The dynamics of linguistic variation: Corpus evidence on English past and present, 291–309. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2002. Comparative sociolinguistics. In Chambers, J. K., Trudgill, Peter & Schilling-Estes, Natalie (eds.), The handbook of language variation and change, 729–63. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2003–6. Linguistic changes in Canada entering the 21st century. Research grant no. 410–2003–0005. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC).Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2006. ‘So cool, right?’: Canadian English entering the 21st century. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 51(2–3), 309–31.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2007–10. Directions of change in Canadian English. Research grant no. 410-070-048. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC).Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2008. So different and pretty cool! Recycling intensifiers in Canadian English. English Language and Linguistics 12 (2), 361–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2012. Variationist sociolinguistics: Change, observation, interpretation. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Denis, Derek. 2008. Linguistic ruin? LOL! Instant messaging and teen language. American Speech 83 (1), 1–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, John. 1989. Possessives in English. Linguistics 27, 663–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, John. 1995. Linguistic categorization: Prototypes in linguistic theory, 2nd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Thomas, Russel. 1931. Syntactical processes involved in the development of the adnominal periphrastic genitive in the English language. PhD dissertation, University of Michigan. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/78568 (accessed 31 January 2014).Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt. 1996. Dialect in society. In Coulmas, Florian (ed.), Handbook of sociolinguistics, 107–26. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Wolk, Christoph, Bresnan, Joan, Rosenbach, Anette & Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2013. Dative and genitive variability in Late Modern English: Exploring cross-constructional variation and change. Diachronica 30 (3), 382–419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zaenen, Annie, Carletta, Jean, Garretson, Gregory, Bresnan, Joan, Koontz-Garboden, Andrew, Tatiana Nikitina, O’Connor, M. Catherine & Wasow, Tom. 2004. Animacy encoding in English: Why and how. In Webber, Bonnie & Byron, Donna (eds.), Proceedings of the 2004 ACL Workshop on Discourse Annotation, 118–25. East Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W04/ (accessed 4 August 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar